Page 6 RAIN May 1980 M.S. When we star.ted there were ten of us interested in working independently as artists, and we didn't want to-work together. Basically, we were all interested in doing different things. We had no common thread through our work. So we decided instead of forming a company to rent and share space. It's worked well. I think that's why it survived through the years. Somehow we've maintained our low-key existence. ' -on structure s:T. We have a stru~ture to an extent. We have an administrative structure. We have-a board of advisors that are members of the the-· ater ... representatives who are elected by the group to handle the everyday mundane business that the whole group didn't really need to decide or want to decide. We still have group,meetings . . . we have reps. meetings about once a week ... we take care of busine~s and analyze problems and suggest solutions .. .,then it takes a vote of the general meeting to make any real decisions ... the board does11't run the theater artistically ... it's far more efficient n_ow and far more productive. A.C. We tried to get too·structured. We decided to write a charter and form subgroups that would research this and that. It got to be unwieldy and a lot of people got turned off. There was a split where some of us wanted more structure and to have meetings run in an efficient way and,there were the quasi-anarchists. They wanted meetings to be spontaneous without agendas. Polarization took place within the group. • B.G. Our primary function is to be a really viable professional commercial gallery. We want to s_ell work and we wantto operate commercially. We want to fulfill our own need ~ithout having to justify directly .or indirectly to the community in terms of performing education. We thought that we're always going to perform that function. In terms of financing the gallery, grant money tends to dry up. We thought it may be harder initially to make it commercially, but that in the long run we'd be better off to start out this way and stick it out. , We have a board of directors made up of a majority of our members and a minority from the community. We haven't used them quite in the way we might have, but we're still figuring it out: We'll be a year old in April. M.S. Theoretically, we all share. There may be fixed tasks we may take on. It's not an efficiently-run business operation. We do what we can., . Our business skills are getting better. There's a certain atti- . tude about business skills: "They're not that important," "They're boring," or "They're drudgery." And then there's everybody's own political trip about money. It slows us down, keeps us slowed down for a long time. We're stepping up our operating procedures a bit,· and as a result we're get;ing better in terms of the space itself. Right now, everythin.g's working! Andthe people who are there are interested in the space and·they are committed to it. We've tightened our structure to a point that if people aren't inten;sted in business skills and sharing that kind of work then they are not invited into the situation anymore. We're interes,ted in the process of working and what it means to be a whrking artist. And in simply maintaining the space. That has a shared kind of concept. People have since dropped out or decided that kind of,structure wasn't working for them. -on goals within the collective . S.T. I see us coming out of that political u:npetus and developing goals whic,h are a little broader than political theatei;. Our basic goal is to do quality origina1l or alternative theater . . . within the group not everybody is 100 percent involved in every production .. . the thing is we support each other's differences. We all agree that we should be working at Storefront and pursuing our own crafts .. . developing our crafts .. ._ I wanted to work with a creative grou_p, and I got it. , A.C. People were coming fro~ lots of different angles. You had people in the collective who were uncompromising experimental ani:rpators and you had people who were involved in making very cute cartoon characters for Volkswagen TV commercials. It didn't matter. It's the same world9f ki'netics, making things move in magical ways. In th~ first years of the collective nothing seemed to make any difference·at all, except the fact that this community did exist. That there was the opportunity for people to talk to each other about the basic issues of animation. • B.G. It made us feel very optimistic to open a gallery and know we had a chance.to sell the work. Whether _I'm going to be able to sell the work does not affect imagery but it makes you feel better. Space is very important. What h~ppens is that a lot of people see the work on _an on-going basis-, and then you starf'selling. 1~ ,1 ~·····•···•·••·•· ; ~ ~-■It■ .d .,. -.. •• i: i: ·e· • -Steve Rudman • Non-Profit Corporations, prganiz~tions and Associati,ms, ~ Hctw.. • ard L. Oleck, Prentke~Hall, Inc., 3~ ed., 1~4. . .· • _.•·. .... . . <i • • Funding for Social (;hange, How to Bec.ome an ij,nplo,yer an.d &Jin ? · Tax Exempt Status, Volume 1, byStella,Alvo and Kate Sha.c~foni1 . M.S. The hardest thing about being an artist and working in a collective situation is that people have many different beliefs 'about what their art is , their p;rsonal visipn, etc. The nature of art being what it is, people should go at their own pace and with'their own • vision, - I think it's important to affect people'~vision, and to explore my own. ·How you see and how you feel are impo~tant things to • share with people. I believe in lo9sening things up in people so that we have strong spiritual and emotional bases that we're working from. Then performance becomes another form of communication between people-a personal tapping into our psyches. '
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz